These days, at least in Tennessee, the scenery-clotting billboards encountered on any drive include ads touting now-legal moonshine. The fiery drink’s legitimization was quickly seized upon by those who saw the potential for sales. And sales, of course, are what billboards are all about.

Well, to my generation, legalization has brought a serious dilution to moonshine’s aura, to its mystique. And I wonder what Kirby, Walden Creek’s longtime practitioner of illegal distillation of corn, would make of it.

My introduction to Kirby’s product came when I was in college in the late 1960s—though the consumption ended following a couple of encounters. Actually, the encounters continued, but I refused to drink the stuff after quickly learning why one of moonshine’s nicknames is “pop-skull.”

A co-worker introduced me to ’shine when he and I visited a bootlegger in Vestal late one night. We then returned to his place in Fort Sanders and were soon joined by two UT football players, one an offensive lineman, the other a stalwart of the defensive front.

Both were the size that their positions demanded. And both were quickly reduced to blubbering fools by the hooch.

I met Kirby a bit later when my friend, his roommate, and the roommate’s girlfriend—Inga for the purposes of this column—made the drive to Wears Valley to Kirby’s place. There, Kirby introduced us to his ritual. We sat outside and shot the bull, Kirby taking a keen interest in Inga. Then we sampled his product, a price was agreed on, and the sale was completed.

As I recall, most of the 40-minute drive back to Fort Sanders was taken up by Inga complaining about Kirby being a creep, “a disgusting, dirty old drunk.”

Decades later I ran across Kirby again—he showed up as a character in Cormac McCarthy’s Southern Gothic novel, Child of God. He was living on Walden’s Creek and still dispensing moonshine.

Kirby’s name came up again recently when a friend and I, wandering around the hills northeast of Johnson City, noticed one of the moonshine billboards. I told him about Kirby and the trip to Wears Valley.

“Did I ever tell you about my moonshine experience?” he asked. He hadn’t, so he did.

“I got a call one afternoon from one of my customers [he’s in sales, describing himself as an ‘iron peddler’]. He wanted me to stop by. So I took a company car and drove over to his office.

“He’s always asking me to run him to this place or that, so I wasn’t surprised when he wanted me to take him ‘a couple of miles’ up the road for a minute.

“Of course, it was about a dozen miles, and it was up this curvy mountain road. We finally pulled off the highway at an old barn and he told me to wait in the car until he yelled to come on up.

“He walked up the hill to the house and went inside. I waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, he stuck his head out the door and yelled for me to come on up.

“As I got close I could hear hillbilly music. When I opened the door, I saw my friend, his buddy and his wife, and a younger woman who, it turned out, was their daughter. The furniture had been pulled back and the owner and his wife were dancing.

“With a ‘you dance, don’t ya?’ inquiry, the daughter grabbed me and I was in the middle of the festivities. The jar was being passed around, but by then the rest of them were so drunk they didn’t notice that I was faking the drinking.

“After five or six dances, I managed to get my client outside and back to the barn. He then loaded a half-dozen gallon jugs of ’shine into the trunk of my car. Remember, now, this was a company car.

“I headed back to his place, anxious to get shed of both my client and his purchases. Then I noticed a state trooper on my tail.

“When I pointed out that the law was following us my friend stayed calm. ‘Pull into the first driveway you see and turn off your lights,’ he said. It seemed like miles before we came upon a turn-off, but finally we did. The trooper went right on by.

“‘See,’ my friend said, ‘You were worried for nothing.’ But I’ll tell you one thing, I haven’t given him any rides since—I don’t care how good a customer he is.”

Chris Wohlwend

Chris Wohlwend's Restless Native addresses the characters and absurdities of Knoxville, as well as the lessons learned pursuing the newspaper trade during the tumult that was the 1960s. He spent 35 years working for newspapers and magazines in Miami, Charlotte, Louisville, Dallas, Kansas City, and Atlanta. As an editor, he was involved in winning several national awards. He returned to Knoxville in the late 1990s and now teaches journalism part-time at the University of Tennessee. His freelance pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and numerous other publications.